Users enjoy entertainment content in many different ways. Users can enjoy content in ways dictated by a traditional content distributor such as a radio station or movie theater by listening to songs on the radio or watching movies in the theater. Users also enjoy content using physical media usually purchased from another type of content distributor, e.g., through purchasing songs on CD or movies on DVD from a store.
More recently, users have been able to access entertainment content digitally, either by recording content or accessing content through services that provide content according to subscription, purchase, rental or other such business models. Content acquired this way may permit more flexible ways to pay for and use content including accessing content for a period of time, e.g., by subscribing to a service that allows them to play a large collection of songs on their portable media player for 30 days. Another flexible way is to pay to save or download content a certain number of times, e.g., “buying” a song to have a right to download it to a number of computers and then transfer it to a certain number of devices. Still another way is similar to renting a movie in a local video store, in that a user pays to enjoy the content during a period of time, such as to play a movie on his television during a weekend.
These newer services, however, have had significant challenges to overcome in order to distribute entertainment content securely. Software-based protections, for example, require constant investment in new technology to prevent pirated copies and other misuse of the content. In part because of this, System On a Chip (SOC) hardware solutions were developed. These current hardware solutions are generally oriented around fairly straightforward playback pipelines. These pipelines have an input stage, decryption and key management stage, a decoding stage, and an output stage. All of these stages are performed internally by the SOC hardware solution, which helps keep the content secure.
Because these stages are performed internally on one integrated chip, however, the SOC hardware solution includes a limited number of particular graphics and/or audio output hardware and restricts the scenarios primarily to playback. With such limited output hardware current SOC hardware solutions may not be able to output to more than one type of device, e.g., to televisions but not to computer monitors.
Further, these SOC hardware solutions often fail to account for many of the complexities around distributed policy evaluation and content protection and for many scenarios consumers expect to use to be able to enjoy their content. They also often fail to adequately address Digital Rights Management (DRM) domains. DRM domains enable usage of content across devices and personal computers that are members of a domain.
These failures of SOC hardware solutions may be especially problematic for users wishing to use entertainment content with their personal computers, mobile devices, and the like. A user wishing to view a music video on his or her laptop computer purchased from a subscription music service, for example, may not be able to easily view that video using his or her high-end graphics card. The user may instead have to rely on the graphics capabilities of the SOC hardware solution, which is often redundant or inferior to his or her high-end graphics card. In short, two example limitations of the SOC hardware solutions include lower-resolution video playback or not being able to play the content on a desired device, though higher cost or other limitations may also exist.